ANNALS W E four Hollanders-Nell, Yoka, Dries, and I-began our rowboat trip down the Elbe RIver from Riesa, a town in eastern Germany, on the morning of May 22, 1945, fifteen days after the advance of the Russian Army had freed us from prison in the village of Waldheim, thirty miles to the south Dries was a twenty- six-year-old former merchant seaman who had been condemned to death by the Nazis for trying to escape from Hol- land to England, where he planned to join the Allied Armíes; Nell, Y oka, and I had met him outside the men's prison at Waldheirn only a few hours after the doors to our cells in the women's prison were unlocked. We three young wom- en-NelJ was thirty, Yoka was twenty, and I, known as Zip, was twenty- eight-had been caught by the Gestapo while working in the Dutch Resistance, and had also been condemned to death. After being sentenced, we had spent nine months together in various Nazi prisons while our captors inexplicably delayed executing us. Since the Russians, once having liber- ated us, obdurately refused to let us proceed west to the American lines, we had finally, after ten days of scheming and making preparations, slipped out of Waldhelm by the road up to Riesa, e.xpecting somehow to make our way two hundred and eighty miles down the river to Hamburg, whIch we under- stood was occupied by the British. The authorities there, we felt sure, would help us get back to our homes as speedily as possible. It had taken us nearly three days to cover the dIstance from Wald- heim to Riesa, dragging our few posses- sions behind us in two little wagons. Now we were happily continuipg our journey, drifting along in a rugged, iron-bottomed rowboat that had prov- identially been procured for us by two Dutch barge skippers, named Hartmans and Asmus, whom we had found liv- ing aboard their vessels a few miles up the river from Riesa; they had been forced by the Nazis to leave the Rhine River, where they had operated be- fore the war, and go to the Elbe, and, with the collapse of the German east- ern front, they had been stalled in their present mooring place by the wreckage of bombed or blown-up bridges. They had supplied us not only with our boat, which they genially liberated for us from a German barge, but with food, a sack of tobacco leaves, an alarm clock, a demijohn of fresh water, and a bottle of schnapps This last luxury, alas, we had already 97 OF THe LIBeRA TION __ N \ \ .. I \ nO" PR Ie Ë"S ,<--. " 1 0,"7 (') ÇLA)l-ItDl ,,,'.. <. ,. ALl 5" 1'141/flS' MU5'1 co 1 THE JOUR.NEY HOME-III been obliged to forfeIt to a Russian sentry who had brought us ashore by firing a shot into the water a few feet ahead of us as we were approaching a pontoon bridge at Riesa. We had a pass, written in Russian, but the sentry had been incapable of reading it, and had made a good thing of his illiteracy by downing our bottle, as a more comprehensible form of authoriza- tion. We, of course, couldn't read the pass ourselves, and the official who issued it-a dour young woman at Russian headquarters in Riesa-hadn't bothered to tell us what it said. For- tunately, though, our frieI1ds on the barges had managed to get it translated for us before we left. "Go with boat, no matter where," it read-a directive that had amazed and delighted us, since we had feared that it might be nothing more than a pass to a displaced-persons 1 ., .1 .... ."Þ ^ - ) " .." \ \,- Jf . ., . - ...... t ,.." 0 ....--- -- .... ,., I camp near Riesa into which the Rus- sians were herding great numbers of Westerners. The idea of being sent to such a camp, uninviting under any cir- cumstances, was especially distasteful to us because we understood that the Rus- sians were planning a delayed and roundabout trip home for those thev corralled. Shortly after the small tragedy of the schnapps, the wind veered to the north, slowing our progress considerably. We discovered that we could no longer simply drift, for despite Dries' best ef- forts wIth our steering oar, we were being pushed toward first one bank and then the other. So we took turns at row- ing-not steadily but just whenever a few pulls on the oars were needed to keep our boat in midstream The river meandered peacefully along between grassy banks, under a sunny sky. Once, a couple of Russian soldiers hailed us, but all they wanted was to be ferried ;:." :j? .:, t , 1 '. " # . ,:,..% ')- ., , \ " "'... \ 4 Þ", ,. "<<'.,:,.. .... . , ... {'., t i >!> ; .' )" .. -- t '\ I ' 'i> . . f$' ---- " -- -- .. \ r , I , ß ((Confidentially, we still have a few leftover fifty-fives we'd ltke to unload"